"Weary thought, incapable of maintaining itself on the plane of immanence, can no longer bear the infinite speeds of the third kind that, in the manner of a vortex, measure the concept’s copresence to all its intensive components at once. It falls back on the relative speeds that concern only the succession of movement from one point to another, from one extensive component to an other, from an idea to another, and that measure simple associations without being able to reconstitute any concept."

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, p.214; quoted by Isabelle Stengers)

The marathon course is drawn, inscribed within the established grids of an urban core. New barriers are created, temporarily cutting off certain flows (cars, bicycles, pedestrians) in order to facilitate others: a gated conduit for the gaited competitors who will run on this crisp gray morning.

This cut creates a new surface, or perhaps we can say it multiplies surfaces — it is surfacing, actively producing itself in the proliferating striations of the new territory. Perhaps we can say it is for security, or perhaps we can say that security offers the alibi for a folding of spectacle upon itself, the intestinal guts of vectoral capitalism turned outwards as if Lyotard's great ephemeral skin revealing the shit that really makes the machinery slicken.

Glide then, runners: extend your energetics into this libidinal surface as you race to that cloaca called a finish line. The light cycles of sponsorship precede your motorcade at the flanks, both shiny and festering with their spectacular repetition and insatiable appetite. But remember this digestive cookie from Guattari as footstep and breath connect to eyes and stomach: "It's on this level of investments of desire that there are reserves of capacity to express the revolt."

4. Dehabituated rhythms and changed or differential spatial parameters offer an invitation for novel gestural responses to the artwork.

5. When movement moves its way into the "aesthetic experience" proper, it continues to want to move, this time with the artwork, co-composing with it, contouring and creating with it.

6. It is not so much fatigue that one initially notices upon arrival at an artwork, but rather an interference of rhythms between runner and work, which thereafter gradually begin to harmonize or compromise. These resonances are of immediate interest in an aesthetico-ethical sense.

7. Habit can have unrefined pathways; one of these concerns its tempo.

8. Bodies are not "ideal", and thus neither should goals be. We understand these both in an affirmative sense.

9. The outwardly prosthetic body only makes evident and explicit the co-composition of all bodies.

10. A familiar gesture, machined differently, can be more more useful than a complex gesture known only to a few.

11. We are describing here an unhygienic experience (sweat, snot, traffic, noise, topography). Which is also in some ways to remind that we have been removed from the laboratory.

12. Speed only demands a greater adeptness with contingency and the aesthetics of failure.

13. There are both inner and outer accelerations that need to be considered in developing and evaluating the program.

14. If one seeks to create a nuclear or exponential energy field, one cannot initiate the reaction at maximum capacity. Rather, the intensity must be slowly increased to avoid the risk of rupture in a very real material sense.

15. The event itself is a collective enunciation — of gesture and energy. But so long as we remain bound to the particulars of language and its transmission, this collective enunciation must retain a spoken or written dimension as well. Breath must become metric rather than simply serving to inspire and expire.

16. Theses are exhausted and replenished much like mitochondrial reactors and muscular fibres. To elaborate: they, too, have relative catalytic points, elasticities and failure thresholds in the generation of things. And they, too, may also become fuel or worm food for future becomings . . .

on the surface it seems profoundly anti-"ecological" (to use a term floating around right now) to go wholesale into an acceleration: ecologies are more profoundly periods of stillness mixed with accelerations. the latter are very traumatic, especially when considered intensively — childbirth is an acceleration of sorts, in which the "speed" and "distance" involved don't seem like much, and yet are extremely traumatic in both material and psychic senses (and we could include the traumas of other accelerations, such as returning from space travel, car accidents, the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. etc.).

what sort of ruptures, tears and detachments would be implied in an accelerationism at the planetary level?

before this technical infrastructure was "turned on", so to speak, i'd love to know more about the ontological, epistemological and ethical problems entailed — for example, collaborative decision-making which is shot through by speed and its intensified fragmentation of part-knowledges and part-subjects.

since it wouldn't be animals, rocks or other "objects" creating these technical infrastructures it seems fair to ask these questions even if they seem a little "humanist" in the process.

in the meantime, can we start more simply by "training" for an accelerationist world, not unlike how a world-class sprinter would do: by dialing up tempo and intensity incrementally, learning how to endure, speeding up and slowing down "schizostrategically" (to use joseph's term), allowing traumas (muscular, psychic, relational) to heal more readily, all while preparing for the "big race" — even if we don't know what or when said race is, or if it is for a people to come?

__________

(thoughts that have been gestating for a while, and which have only "accelerated" since reading nick srnicek and alex williams' #accelerate manifesto and mckenzie wark's response a few weeks ago.)

Two days of complete exhaustion and emotional depletion after the Boston Marathon … and I find both the desire and need to run.

I ask myself why??

Running makes me smile and has the power to change a day.
I run because no two runs are ever the same.
I run because it fills my heart with joy.
I run because success and happiness lies within.
I run to keep my mind and spirit clear and strong.
I run because I value and care for my health.
I run to be with amazing friends.
I run to be a part of an incredible community of runners that have welcomed, mentored, supported and encouraged.
I run because of the journey.
I run to embrace adversity.
I run because I can.

What was supposed to be a celebratory, joyous, and momentous event … turned into disappointment.

I ask myself why?

Was it the cowardly acts of terrorism that destroyed and deflated the whole event, manufacturing the run as completely meaningless? Was it my heavy heart for the victims who were fighting for lives and limbs? Was it the media that glorified the terror to enhance its spectacle? Or had it been something more personal, more selfish? Was it the thought of all those winter training hours suddenly deemed insignificant due to the bronchitis that had attacked my chest and lungs just days before I was to run? Was it that I couldn’t have my peak physical performance on the stage of the world’s oldest and most iconic marathon?

Maybe . . .

But the tragic events that occurred in Boston have impacted me personally and changed my perspective forever. My true disappointment laid within me … it rested in my inability to actually go back to the foundations of why I run in the first place. In the moment, I forgot to savour the opportunity and experience I was so blessed and privileged to have. Success isn't measured by a stopwatch; it's distinguished by the journey.

Explosions Sirens Chaos Panic Confusion

Why?

Within a blink, I may not have been so lucky — an opportunity lost and an experience taken for granted.

I finished the Boston Marathon.
I was with a loved one at the time of the explosion.
I was warm.
I had my belongings.
I was safe and healthy.
I was so very blessed.

I am fortunate enough to get a second chance in 2014 to revisit this question of "why?"

Running is my comfort … Boston is my inspiration.

_______________

(Lindsay LaMorre is a Health and Physical Education specialist who lives and works in Toronto. She wore bib number 10577 at Boston 2013.)

The treadmill: prison disciplinary technology, work machine, spinning, grinding. But what, precisely, is being produced? Once the substratum of corn or grain is removed from the carceral equation and the treadmill takes a new turn in the production of bodies, hygiene and spectacle, we can say that the grind is one of spacetime itself: the elongation of the tangent in order to give an apparent linearity to what is a circular process — an illusion of displacement produced, certainly, but even more fundamentally the illusion of history and progress made (and its "high of mechanical annihilation").

The grind becomes ground and the body writes the metrics of its own imagined passage, or perhaps only an endless series of sweaty ellipses — unless elliptical thoughts are of another order altogether.

Only by pursuing a radical critique on the intellectual, social, affective, sexual and psychic levels can you find any way to break through the soft consensus of normality and discover something worth living for.

Brian Holmes

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

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sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.